I want to hear your WEIRDEST stories.

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Permalink Reply by Leah C (Musicorn) on September 30, 2015 at 11:33am

This is my story:

The weirdest thing that ever happened to me occurred when I was eight years old. That was the year I attended my dad’s cousin’s wedding. She was marrying a man who came from a strict Muslim family. In context, our family was a typical white American family. As it turned out, both cultures ended up being stretched nearly to their breaking point.

 

My dad and his two brothers had travelled from multiples states away to attend the wedding in Virginia. Also in attendance were myself, my sister, and three of our cousins: five children under the age of ten, none of whose mothers were present. For us the drama began before the wedding started, when we discovered that all three of my cousins had neglected to pack any formal attire, and my grandmother was forced to take them on an emergency shopping trip. (Later I learned that my two uncles also decided to go golfing the morning of the wedding, and showed up late, in sweaty golfing clothes.)

 

The wedding itself was held in a country club with a partition set up right across the middle. Female guests were instructed to sit to the left of the partition; male guests, to the right. Round tables had been set up on both sides, and guests were seated in groups around these. Beside the centerpiece of each table was one of those one-use disposable cameras and a note instructing guests to “capture memorable moments from the wedding”. (This was before the days of cell phone cameras. On a side note, NEVER DO THIS.)

 

My grandmother, my sister, my two female cousins and I sat down at a table not far from the mother of the bride (my great-uncle’s ex-wife). My grandmother was a moderate and tolerant person; the mother of the bride, however, had a vibrant personality and a dress sense to match. You could have probably made five versions of her outfit out of the material that any one Muslim woman in attendance was wearing. The Muslim women were all heavily veiled and appeared ghostly to my young, ignorant eyes.

 

The entire wedding ceremony was done on the men’s side of the partition, making it totally invisible to us. My great-uncle, the father of the bride, wore his kilts and played the bagpipes for the bride’s entrance. An imam performed the ceremony, and I couldn’t even tell if he was speaking in English or another language. I am told that at one point the bride’s mother called across the partition for him to speak up, please, we couldn’t understand. However, the ceremony was successfully performed, and then all of the guests were invited to join the women on their side of the partition for a traditional American-style reception, cake and all. At this point, the prospect of all those disposable cameras free for the taking proved too great a temptation for the young children, who had been forced to sit quietly through a long and unintelligible ceremony. They seized cameras and began to run everywhere, photographing anything that happened to be directly in front of them. My grandmother, in the following years, was fond of telling how after their honeymoon the newlyweds picked up a grocery-bag-full of their developed pictures, 90% of which were shots of guests’ knees.

 

In spite of everything, I am told that my father’s cousin and her husband remain happily married to this day.

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